November 15, 2011

Chocolates of India

A while ago, I had an idea to create chocolates by enrobing some of the traditional sweets I enjoyed as a child. I called this Chocolates of India, spent months perfecting a chocolate blend that is compatible with these sweets, and offered a few samples to people for feedback.

I got great feedback — People literally screamed “This is fucking delicious!” in ecstasy. Others liked it enough to offer to buy it from me on the spot –even though none were for sale. I felt vindicated — I had spent months figuring out how to make the two sweets compatible, since flavor matching chocolate to indian sweets was amazingly hard.

But then came the biggest two problems in starting a business selling the chocolates:
1. The chocolates are very labor expensive to produce. I have to evaporate milk for a day to get the base Mithai ready, then I have to spend another hour or so getting the chocolate ready.
2. Chocolates like this are bought in store — people won’t really buy online, so the small batches needed to start-up are out of the question.

Other problems remain to be solved — those are around packaging and presentation. However, I feel that those are minor compared to the difficulty of making the chocolates right now and having a sales venue for them.

In order to make a business selling these, I need to solve the two problems. For problem 1, a new machine must be invented — an Automatic Mithai maker( these exist in India, but can’t be found here in the States). For the second problem, I need to be able to get retail space with enough walk-by traffic to make the sales worthwhile. I’ve built repraps and have been designing my own machines — I believe I have the skills needed to solve the engineering problem. I’ll need capital to get the machine approved for food use, hire consultants for packaging and presentation, and get commercial space where I can sell the chocolates.